


Dr. Rocky Bronzino

by FridaysAt9



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, New Jersey, On the Run, Post-Episode: s09e05 Lord of the Flies, Rutgers University, shameless flirting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:27:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26423353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FridaysAt9/pseuds/FridaysAt9
Summary: When Mulder and Scully are on the run they talk about anything and everything, including Dr. Rocky Bronzino.My entry into the X-files Episode Fanfic Exchange 2020.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 14
Kudos: 64
Collections: X-Files Episode Fanfic Exchange (2020)





	Dr. Rocky Bronzino

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AweburnPhoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AweburnPhoenix/gifts).



> My prompt: It was funny seeing "Rocky" trying to hit on Scully repeatedly and her ignoring him completely. So, I'd like something similar, maybe with another Professor in the Academy or whatever you come up with.
> 
> Laia! Your prompt proved to be a challenge for me! I never rewatch season 9, but when I watched this episode I couldn't believe it! The medical examiner's office was in the town where I grew up AND I went to Rutgers, just like Rocky! So I had to pick fun at both a little bit.
> 
> I hope you don't mind that I set the story a little later on. I just wish we could have seen Mulder and Rocky together and this is the closest we will get. Thanks for this prompt!
> 
> Of course thank you to my betas Erosanderis and ATTHS_TWICE. You guys are awesome!

They had been driving for days, stopping only to sleep, use the bathroom, and grab food to eat in the car. At first they had been on edge, the car filling with nervous silence, but then they had slipped into the comfortable banter that had occupied their time on road trips like this through their years working together. 

But now, in the dark night of day four on the road, they sat in silence, a lull in the conversation. There was a lot of uncertainty, and Scully was lost in her own mind, thoughts flitting from what she forgot to pack, concern for her mother, the book she had been reading, to memories of cases, conversations with Skinner, and the look on the faces of Doggett and Reyes as they left. 

At some point a fly had gotten in the car and was buzzing around the window, trying to find a way out. Scully lowered the window and watched it fly outside, tugged away by the force of the car. 

“Did I ever tell you about Dr. Rocky Bronzino?” she asked Mulder, still looking out the window. They had emailed back and forth while he was gone, but she only shared bits and pieces of the cases she had been working on. The content of those emails had mostly consisted of feelings, longing and heartfelt confessions that they had never had the courage to express in person. Scully turned to look at him, still amazed that they were together again.

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Oh, you would have loved him,” she said with a smile. 

“I sense sarcasm,” he said, turning to her before returning his attention to the road. 

“Doggett and Reyes called me in on a case in New Jersey,” she started. “A boy was killed by flies that feasted on his sinuses and brain matter.”

“Scully, come on,” Mulder said, looking pale. “We just ate.” 

She laughed a little and continued. “Turns out a teenage boy was able to direct bugs at will using insect pheromones.”

At this point, Mulder turned to look at her in disbelief. “Look at you, my little believer.”

Scully didn’t say anything, only shrugged with a smile. It was no secret that she had fallen into Mulder’s role in his absence. She was still hesitant to believe all the things that she had seen, but without him there as the counterpoint to her scientific reasoning, she had found herself more willing to accept more peculiar explanations. 

“Anyway,” she said with a smirk, “the medical examiner called in an entomological expert from Rutgers to assist on the case.”

“Enter Dr. Bronzino,” Mulder said.

“Rocky,” Scully said, remembering his cocky swagger, “as he insisted on being called. He walked into the medical examiner's office spewing information about flies in Australia, or the Amazon or whatever— showboating— with no introduction. Then we finally get one, individually mind you, like ‘I’m Dr. Rocky Bronzino. Hi. Rocky Bronzino. Hello there. Rocky Bronzino, field entomological expert at Rutgers University, at your service.’”

“He did not say that,” Mulder said. 

“He did.”

“So Jersey.”

“Yes!” Scully practically shouted. “That’s exactly what I thought! He was so cocky and full of himself, and the whole time I was there… I swear everyone was hitting on me.”

“Well, Scully,” he said, turning to her and wiggling his eyebrows. “There’s a reason for that.”

She smiled. Scully was no stranger to unwanted advances from men. She had caught other agents staring at her out of the corner of her eye and she knew there had always been gossip about her and Mulder and the status of their relationship. Some days the fact that men thought that they had the right to leer at her made her blood boil. On other days, she just accepted it as the way things were. On her absolute worst days, she took those looks as validation that she was doing something right, and then hated herself for it. 

When she was first assigned to Mulder, she was caught off guard by his level of comfort with the stranger who had been sent to “debunk his work.” It took no time at all for him to begin invading her personal space, putting his hand on her back, talking to her inches from her face. He made comments laced in sexual innuendos and gazed at her in a way that was never strictly professional. 

But the funny thing about it was that their relationship was so close, so natural, that his tactile nature and inability to stay out of her personal space felt normal and she had grown accustomed to it after only a few weeks. She had never minded any “advances” when they came from him. 

“The medical examiner’s office was in the judicial complex which, for some inexplicable reason, was built directly next to a high school. Court house, county jail, all of it, right next door to a building filled with teenagers.”

“Seems completely logical to me.”

“Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes. “When I needed some lunch and a break from Rocky, I walked down the street to a cafe, the Java Joint, I remember, and the streets were swarmed with teenagers out for lunch. One of them actually wolf whistled at me.”

“Did you get his name?” Mulder asked in a threatening tone, causing Scully to laugh. 

There was a beat of silence before Mulder said, “You know, I hit on you in New Jersey once.”

“Did you?” Scully asked, thinking back to when they had been in New Jersey together. They had been to a lot of places together, but she tended to remember the cases, the horrors, the unusual happenings and not always the exact locations. Sometimes the past nine years blurred together into a jumble of monsters and gunshots. 

“I did,” he said. “You turned me down.”

“Mulder, what are you talking about?”

“The Jersey Devil?” he said, glancing at her and then back to the road. “Atlantic City? Take in a show? Any of this ringing a bell to you?”

“I remember you thinking that there was a mythical New Jersey monster on the loose, yes,” she said. “And I remember springing you from jail.”

Mulder laughed. “Right. But before that, I asked you to go out in AC with me, and you turned me down. You had a date.”

Like a lightbulb, Scully remembered. “I had a birthday party,” she said. “My godson’s.”

“And then a date.”

“Yes, but that was after I got you out of the drunk tank.”

Mulder was silent while Scully watched the road fly by out her window. 

“Mulder,” she asked, having a thought. “Were you... Were you actually asking me out?”

He didn’t answer, which gave her his answer. 

“Mulder!” she yelled and playfully slapped his arm. “We were on a case! You weren’t serious, were you?”

“I thought it would be fun to do something in our off hours,” he said, sounding timid. “I wasn’t actually planning it to be a date, but I don’t know Scully. I liked you. I wanted to have some fun.” 

Scully put her hand on top of his on the gear shift. “I’m sorry, Mulder.”

He shrugged. 

“And then you didn’t ask me out again for years?” she asked with a laugh. 

“I asked you out plenty of times Scully,” he said, “but I guess we were just too good as partners for it to turn into anything else.” 

“It eventually did,” she said and he nodded. 

“So what happened to Mr. Balboa?” he asked. “Rocky.”

“Well,” Scully said, thinking where to start. “We went to the suspect’s neighborhood with Rocky’s bio-sensor to see if we could pick up any unusual levels of insect pheromones. He tried to convince me to go to dinner with him before he would give me the address of where to meet.”

“So unprofessional,” Mulder said, shaking his head. 

“You just admitted to asking me out while on a case!”

“That’s different.”

“Mulder,” she said, “how is that different?”

He turned towards her with a look that sent butterflies straight to her stomach. “It’s me.” 

“Anyway,” she said, suddenly feeling desperate to find a hotel to stop in for the night. “After explaining to me how pheromones work and also explaining to me how women’s menstrual cycles synch up when they are in groups —”

“He did not.”

Scully just held her hand up to him. “He also told me that when a male and female calliphoridae flies mate they stay joined for up to an hour and a half.”

“Rutgers, you said? I’m going to look him up and kick his ass.” 

Scully laughed, but she had seen Mulder defend her before and she didn’t put it past him. 

“You know,” she said, suddenly realizing something. “I visited Rutgers once, in college. My friend from high school invited me to stay with her one weekend. It was awful, as I remember. She took me to a frat party and left me to go make out with a guy from her geology class. I spent the night dodging the advances of drunk and horny frat brothers with only one thought on their minds.”

“Sounds like Rocky probably fits right in there,” Mulder said with a smirk on his face.

“Anyway, there were an abnormal amount of insect pheromones in the area. Doggett and Reyes got a sample from their suspect which sent Rocky’s bio-sensor off the charts, so we went to confront him.”

Scully stopped and chuckled to herself. 

“What’s so funny?” Mulder asked. 

“He was so excited to ‘have a partner,’” she said, holding back a laugh. “He actually said I completed him.”

Mulder said nothing, just turned to her with a look that said, you’ve got to be kidding me. 

“Honestly Mulder, it was nice to be in the field with someone who was so able to express himself,” she told him. 

“I asked you out and you turned me down.” 

Scully smiled. “So in the end, the kid and his mother both disappeared, we found his father dead in some sort of enormous insect web, the same type of web that Reyes and Rocky found themselves in. Reyes was fine, but by the time we got to Rocky, he didn’t have a pulse.”

“Please tell me he died.”

Scully sighed. “I wasn’t so lucky,” she said. “We cut him down and I gave him CPR. He didn’t even have the decency to choke and gasp for air once he came back to consciousness. He let me keep going until the next pulse check.”

“Bastard.”

“Yeah.”

They drove in silence until they passed a sign for lodging at the next exit. 

“Want to call it a night?” Mulder asked.

Scully nodded. “Yeah, I’m ready for a rest.”

“So Rocky,” Mulder said. “He had you big time.”

Scully looked at him quizzically until she realized what he was referencing. “Mulder, I wasn’t—” 

“I know,” he told her and squeezed her hand. His smile made her stomach flip, knowing that it was all for her and that there was nothing keeping them apart anymore. 

They turned off the road, a neon vacancy sign welcoming them to their home for the night. Mulder parked their car and grabbed the one small bag they had between them. Scully emptied the car of the discarded wrappers, cans and takeout cups. They met at the entrance to the lobby where Mulder took her hand and started towards the automatic door. It slid open, but Scully stayed in place. 

“What’s up, G woman?” Mulder asked her, stepping in close, towering over her short frame.

She looked up at him and said, “As far as first kisses go, it wasn’t that bad.”

“Are we still talking about Rocky? Or spaceship CPR?”

“The latter.”

“You’re counting that?” he asked her, his breath tickling her face from his closeness. 

“Why not?” she asked. “All that hand holding and forehead kissing. You bringing me back to life was kind of a big deal.”

“It was,” he agreed, leaning in even closer still. “But I can do better than that.”

“I know you can,” she said, tilting her face up to him so their lips could meet. And there it was. Outside of this hotel in god knows what town, she was kissing Fox Mulder. Neither of them was missing, no one was injured. It was just the two of them, finally together, starting a new life as a pair.

Mulder pulled back and rubbed his nose against hers. 

“Let’s go get a room.”


End file.
